


A Near Miss

by trajectory



Series: Repercussions [3]
Category: The Transformers (IDW Generation One), Transformers - All Media Types
Genre: Background Implied Feelings, Canon Compliant, Gen, Missing Scene
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-26
Updated: 2019-08-26
Packaged: 2020-09-26 19:07:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,034
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20394679
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/trajectory/pseuds/trajectory
Summary: And then Vortex started screaming.





	A Near Miss

**Author's Note:**

> Set during the activation of Tyrest’s universal killswitch, a few days after Starscream became the ruler of Iacon.
> 
> A thank you goes out to my beta for her help with this! This fic is placed before the events of Dark Cybertron. Mechs from the colonies haven’t started living in Cybertron yet, so they won’t be referred to. There’s only neutrals, Autobots, and Decepticons. Since the Decepticon slums don’t get set up until after Metroplex integrates into Iacon, I decided the Combaticons ditched the Deception pen as soon as they could and stayed in one of the shabbier towers from early exRID until Shockwave’s “feed the universe into a black hole wired into my chest” plot destroyed it.

Blast Off climbed up the tower’s stairs and came back to their apartment on the third story in a better mood than when he’d left it.

After finishing the recon Onslaught ordered him to do, Blast Off had gone to deal with his own chores. The meeting he’d arranged with his contact had gone well. Nobody was hiring Decepticons even after the deterrence chips the Autobots had jammed into their helms were removed.

It was neutrals and Autobots who were getting the jobs. But Blast Off had waded through enough rustwash and spent enough time filing job applications—that always ultimately got turned down—and standing in lines with other mechanisms in search of employment that he'd finally got in touch with a neutral. His manners and connections reminded Blast Off of Swindle, and that prickled at him. After getting his arm reattached and his leg repaired, Swindle had recently decided his time was best spent drinking for hours on end with the rebuilding crew down at that one Autobot racer's bar, so he was being no help. After Blast Off had greased the runway with small talk and niceties he didn't feel, the neutral said he could put in a word for him with a mech who was the supervisor at a construction site where they were laying down replacement pipelines for the trashed city.

Sure, Onslaught was still stubbornly refusing to get a job, which was… less than _ideal_. Blast Off was unwilling to admit even to himself that it bothered him, and therefore mentally shoved deep, deep down where he didn’t have to think about it.

But he could work around that. He might be able to convince Vortex or Brawl to show up if he reminded them of their post-war financial situation, and that if they wanted to continue having their basic living expenses met and their fuel tanks' gauges above empty, the team had to find a steady source of shanix.

(While he would rather not, Blast Off would probably have to come along with Brawl to the construction site for the first few days if the tank got hired, to remind him not to revert to hyper-aggressive habits and pummel the first mech who irritated him too much into scrap.

Because that was a foolproof way for Brawl to get fired before his first pay day.

Like many of the mechs from Vortex’s line of work, Vortex could be patient even if he got irritated. Not Brawl. Not unless he’d been ordered to wait. Brawl preferred to opt for imminent results, like his fist impacting with a helm. The team had saved up enough to tide them over quite well for now, but ‘for now’ wasn’t ‘forever’ and they were going to start running low eventually if they didn’t take action.)

Even if it meant doing drudge work.

Blast Off found it humiliating.

Each time he had to bend and scrape to make ends meet or make a good impression on a potential employer that hopefully wouldn’t remind them of the Combaticons’ brutal wartime reputation, mounting embarrassment bubbled in the pit of his fuel pump.

He was careful to not let it show.

Being friendly on the surface to outsiders had once been something Blast Off did because it had cost him nothing to do so; he didn’t need to mean it. Now it became a necessity for the logistics of helping to support multiple mechs with heavy fueling requirements and a well-known propensity for violence when it was a struggle for one of them to secure work. _Any_ work.

But today he’d made a breakthrough. If it paid off...

Blast Off had taken the salary rates the neutral offered and started rapidly working out the math in his helm on the flight back to the apartment, taking into account they needed to pay off the rent for the apartment in two days, and they had already been late on the amount due the previous week so it was preferable for that not to happen twice in a row.

A little earnings put aside somewhere safe and secret after each shift to accumulate wouldn’t just be for daily expenses: down the line, it would let them handle some repairs to the apartment the landlord wouldn’t pay for, and buy replacement parts for worn out joints. Set up appointments for maintenance checks. Get oil changes.

It was amazing what a fresh oil change could do for morale.

The air outside the apartment smelled like most places on the outskirts of a city left to become slowly mired in disrepute did. To the olfactory sensors, the breeze billowed with concrete dust and grit.

Inside the apartment, the air cooled.

The walls shut out the concrete dust, but it still smelled like the quarters of military frames who all had to share one small set of washracks between them.

Brawl and Onslaught were playing cards in the common room when he walked past them. In the cooking area Blast Off rummaged through a shelf of supplies and repair tools. He found one of the last tubes they had left of Brawl’s stock of degreaser hidden behind an emptied fuel canister, but that wasn’t what he was looking for. It was next to one of the spray paint cans that he spotted his target. Blast Off plucked the pack of rust sticks off the shelf. A snack for himself after the day’s efforts.

Vortex was in the room too, slouched in a chair with his legs crossed and a datapad in his hands.

“Has anything new come up?” Blast Off asked.

“We had another power outage while you were out and about, but that’s been fixed,” Vortex said. He tapped a claw on the screen. “They’ve finally finished restoring galactic communications too.”

“Wait until the off-planet Decepticons hear about this... mess,” Blast Off sighed.

Vortex laughed carelessly. His field went from bored to amused.

“Oh, yeah. That’ll be a treat. But I already got word from some of the ones who ran off with Soundwave,” Vortex leaned forward. “They’re not happy.” He gave the impression of smirking behind his mask. “Word of the hour from the grunts whining up a storm on the Big Conversation is that Starscream’s a traitor who ought to be killed for denouncing the Cause on top of already sucking up to the Autobots instead of killing them, Turmoil _definitely_ bite it during the fighting, and Dreadwing and the Constructicons have gone missing to Primus knows where.”

When Starscream’s name was mentioned, Blast Off made a face.

Blast Off said, “If Soundwave has sense, he’ll be moving to condense his power as the leader in the new vacuum right away. It’s either him or Shockwave at this point, and in their place, I’d sooner follow a dead _turbofox_ before I’d follow the likes of Shockwave.” Popping open the pack of rust sticks, the shuttle paused before he admitted. “I’m assuming Shockwave left with Soundwave. Did he?”

Vortex loosely fanned his rotors out in a shrug, the overhead lighting catching dully off their edges, before snapping them back upright.

“Missing in action. Nobody got a heads up from him. There’s been no sightings of him in Iacon but you never know! Ol’ One-Optic could just be hiding behind the rubble.”

The helicopter highlighted something on the datapad’s screen in purple, clicked, and deleted it.

His field expanding thoughtfully outward with calm, Blast Off rumbled his engine. “So Soundwave’s Decepticons don’t know where the Constructicons went?”

“Not a clue.”

“Swindle mentioned he saw them take off in the same direction the Autobots did,” Blast Off said haughtily.

Vortex lifted an optic ridge. “Why the Pit would they do that?”

“Who knows why the Constructicons _do_ anything?” Blast Off replied, disinterested in speculating. “Perhaps they’re just outraged they were interrupted before they finished wrecking Iacon and they wanted revenge?”

“The Constructicons verses all the remaining Autobots? Their funeral, if it’s only the five of them and not six of ‘em. They don’t have the size advantage anymore,” Vortex said. “I’ll include that then. ‘Cuz Ons will make me type up all of this in a _report_ anyway. Stickler,” Vortex groused over filework, which he made no secret of hating. “So, what’d you find out there?”

“The situation looks the same as before. Nobody’s happy out _there_ either,” Blast Off rolled a rust stick between his fingers before he broke it in half.

“The NAILs are pleased to see the backs of many from both fractions, but they’ve found new topics to be angry about.” Blast Off continued, “The medical center is operational. The wounded are being treated there, regardless of allegiance. Megatron is still imprisoned.”

Retracting his mask, he frowned. “They’re claiming the Aerialbots are still online, but their combiner didn’t look functional when I was there.” By that, Blast Off was referring to the combiner still being in two giant, mangled pieces with that massive spinal strut exposed and sparks spitting out of dented white armor slabs when he had come poking around the site. “There were too many mechs about. I couldn’t verify if they’re going to be reactivated or not.”

“Hope they die,” Vortex commented flippantly.

“They wouldn’t let _you_ watch if they do,” Blast Off said. “Wouldn’t that take the joy out of it for you?”

“Tsk.”

Blast Off lifted his wide shoulders up, then down. “The streets are quiet. Uneasy, but quiet.”

“Lame. Have fun reporting that to Onslaught,” Vortex said. He pointed at the pack. “Blast Off. Are you going to share?”

Face bare, Blast Off took a bite out of the rust stick and chewed. “No. If you wanted these, you should have taken them before I did.”

“Slagger,” Vortex huffed.

“Get over it,” Blast Off said with neither heat nor sympathy to his retort, and turned away, intending to walk to the common room and sit by the window and relax for a moment before starting on his report.

There was a horrible gurgling noise from behind him.

And then Vortex started screaming.

Inactive combat protocols bypassed his control and automatically slammed online in preparation for an enemy assault, and targeting systems for the laser cannons mounted on his legs initialized, shifting into place and priming them to lock onto the first unfamiliar object in motion Blast Off saw and vaporize it. Blast Off put the rust sticks in subspace, yanked his gun out of subspace and snapped around to take aim with both the gun and his locked-and-loaded leg cannons.

Vortex’s knees hit the floor with a dull _thunk_. Blast Off froze.

In the next room over, there was the heavy sound of a body collapsing into a hard surface.

Brawl bellowed.

“Wha…— BOSS!”

Crumpled next to the chair he’d knocked over in his initial spasm, Vortex curled in on himself, hands clamped to both sides of his helm as he shook, noxious smoke spewing out of his wide visor.

“What’s happening? Vortex, you need to tell me what’s wrong so I can help you!” Blast Off demanded, alarmed.

Vortex yowled.

Armor plating bristling, Blast Off stepped forward. His gun’s barrel dropped downward so it was angled towards the floor and it wasn’t pointing in Vortex’s direction, the leg cannon mods folding back up in a series of micro-transformations to their usual positions snug up against his plating. In the face of an unknown threat like… like… what in the world _this_ was, Blast Off didn’t dare disengage his combat protocols.

Yet there was no attacker in sight, nor any visible injury besides the smoke curling out of Vortex’s face.

Over Vortex’s shrieks, Brawl was shouting something.

“ONSLAUGHT, SNAP OUTTA’ IT!”

The words registered as an electric shock right to his core. Blast Off’s helm jerked towards the door that led into the common room, spark squeezing itself up into his intake. It was closed. He couldn’t see Onslaught. He couldn’t—

“Onslaught?! Onsla—Brawl, _what’s going on over there_?”

Brawl barked. “He’s down! There’s uhm, there’s this smoke comin’ outta’ his face? It’s fragging creepy!” Blast Off felt like he’d gotten whalloped in the chest with a load of liquid sharpnel mid-transformation. His optics flared.

Then Brawl hollered at his top volume: “Hey, is that Tex yelling over there?”

“Yes!” Blast Off shouted before forcing himself to keep an even tone. Blast Off knelt down in front of Vortex, grabbing his shoulders to prevent the helicopter from toppling into the floor face-first. “They must be getting harmed by the same thing,” he said quietly. He switched to a private commlink.

_<Stay there. Keep Onslaught stable!>_

_<How? He’s smoking and wheezin’, I dunno know how to make that stop.>_ Brawl boomed back.

Vortex was still screaming like every component in his frame was being eaten up by acid, one by one. But the noise was getting weaker. Inside Vortex’s chassis, Blast Off could almost hear his spark guttering.

He wanted to go to Onslaught, but he couldn’t leave Vortex dying alone on the floor.

Blast Off didn’t know if risking moving the helicopter to the other room would worsen the damage. He wasn’t a medic. It wasn’t his field. Blast Off swallowed, the mechanisms of his intake constricting tight. He had to be practical. Brawl was already with Onslaught anyway. Focus on Vortex. Blast Off wasn’t going to be able to do anything to protect Onslaught from this that Brawl couldn’t do for him.

His gaze darted around the room. Nothing. No visible bombs or weapons. No windows in this room. Just the smoke. Where was the enemy? Who was attacking them? Why _now_? Why were he and Brawl unaffected while Onslaught and Vortex collapsed?

How could they make it stop?

_<I… —>_ Blast Off squashed panic. Panicking was a good way to get yourself and your unit killed on the battlefield. <_Get him on the floor, Brawl.>_

He was already rolling a limp Vortex onto his side, mindful of his back tail.

Shuddering, Vortex let out a burst of static that tried and failed to be words, and blindly struggled to shove him away. Blast Off held onto him, occupied with stopping Vortex from smashing his face into the floor. Or from grabbing at his rotor blades. Blast Off didn’t want to fend off Vortex conducting stabbing attempts with those: they were sharpened to slice clean through metal. Vortex’s strength was feeble. He moved as if his limbs were packed with concrete. It wasn’t hard.

Blast Off checked around the room again.

Enemies? Anything?

Still nothing.

The ghastly yellow smoke kept coming and coming.

_<Smoke means fire. If I poured coolant on his face, do you think it’d help?>_

Blast Off snapped. <_No. You’re an idiot. Don’t do that!>_

_<Then what the frag am I _‘upposed_ to do? We can’t do nothing!>_ Brawl angrily replied.

_<I’m quite aware! I’m trying to think of something.>_ Blast Off said. <_We need a medic.>_

_<We ain’t got a medic!>_

_<I could risk calling one?>_ Blast Off sent over the commlink. But even as he said it, he gave it up as foolish. They had minutes left to act if this kept up. No medic could come up with a treatment on such short notice, nevermind the matter of convincing one to come and take care of a couple Decepticons who hadn’t left Iacon with the rest in the first place.

Vortex quit struggling and shut off his visor. He emitted a thin, shrill whine, filled with static.

Brawl grunted. <_Don’t think Vortex and Onslaught have that much time!>_

_<True. Unfortunately.>_

Blast Off splayed a hand across Vortex’s chest. His visor scrunched up.

It wasn’t fire that was causing the pain wracking through the helicopter. A living Cybertronian’s protoform gave off a distinct scent when one burnt it. Vortex gave off no scent besides that of cheap polish and chemical solvent. But whatever was triggering the smoke spilling out of him was doing no favors to Vortex’s circuitry nor his spark. That had to be addressed. If he manually opened one of Vortex’s medical ports from the outside and overrode the controls to force Vortex open and used his cables to plug Vortex’s systems into his, could he transfer enough power to Vortex to support his spark and keep him alive until this attack passed?

He wasn’t sure, but the alternative was a dead Vortex.

Unacceptable.

They would have to take the risk.

He started to say. <_Brawl, I need to check. Do you know how to operate a ma—?>_

Blast Off cut himself off. Dismay knotted thick in his fuel pump; his air filtration vents caught. His back arching in a convulsion, Vortex had jerked one last time and abruptly went still and silent in Blast Off’s grip.

“... Vortex?” The name slipped out without Blast Off intending it.

Bright red light flickered on, dim and hazy.

Vortex croaked.

Claws scratched weakly at Blast Off’s arm. The words came out low and thick. “Wha_—_zz_—z_t.” The rest of his sentence became beeping and buzzing. He clicked, then groaned, heaving out deep ventilations before giving it up as a bad job all around and resetting his vocalizer. “I… Iz’ it over?”

Vortex tried to sit up, discovered the mechanisms in his limbs were filing a massive complaint against exerting that level of effort, and prepared to take legal action and rebel if he persisted. He flopped back down against Blast Off’s frame.

“You’re okay,” muttered Blast Off.

And if his voice was just a little more than shaky from relief, well.

They were soldiers.

Vortex would know it was common courtesy to pretend not to notice it and not respond.

“Duh,” Vortex reset his vocalizer again, clearing out the crackle of corrupted feedback. His voice was normal again. “It’d take more than that to kill _me_.”

That boast would have been more convincing if Vortex had been capable of sitting upright when he said it.

“I should have known that,” Blast Off gave his shoulder a shove, but didn’t move away.

Fluid from where energon lines had burst dripped down Vortex’s face from his optics in dark rivetlets and ran off his chin. Vortex held his helm. “Did you get the frequency of the truck that ran me over? Might want to pay a visit to them and express my _thanks_.”

“No,” Blast Off admitted. “It isn’t clear what did this.”

“YOU’RE NOT DEAD!” whooped Brawl, loudly enough to make Blast Off sigh.

“_You’ll_ be_—_dead soon if you... don’t stop shouting in my audials because I’ll have torn off your treads and strangled you with them to get… some… quiet...” snarled Onslaught from what sounded like the vicinity of the floor, muffled by the closed door and not sounding any better than Vortex had at first.

In short, Onslaught sounded awful.

That didn’t stop those words from being the best thing Blast Off had heard tonight.

“It got Onslaught too?” Vortex blinked, having been too busy screaming to pay attention to what Brawl and Blast Off had been saying at the time.

Blast Off decided the answer was too obvious to call for a reply. He fished out a cleaning cloth from his subspace and offered it so Vortex could wipe his face off.

“Who cares! We didn’t need a medic after all, all you had to do was tough it out!” Brawl shouted, completely ignoring Onslaught’s demand for him to not shout. His footsteps stomped heavily around the common room’s table. Armor-on-metal scraping sounds heralded Onslaught pushing himself up off the floor. The door beeped and slid open, Brawl filling the doorway. “That was weird! Vortex, you fragger, you better be fine too!”

**////**

From start to finish, it had taken minutes.

**////**

The adrenaline wasn’t going away, weaponry systems insisting on running check after check in case the attack started up again. Warnings queried about elevated energon levels, chemicals pumping fast through his fuel lines. Pop-ups and readouts crowded his HUD. Blast Off had to disable each one to clear his range of vision.

There was no physical enemy he could attack. The pop-ups served no purpose.

The cards from Brawl and Onslaught’s game were sprayed across the table. Nobody bothered to pick them up. The moment his legs worked again, Onslaught had grabbed Vortex and vanished out the door, leaving Blast Off to hold down the fort and keep Brawl from doing anything reckless.

The two mechs had returned right after Blast Off finished calling Swindle to check if he was functioning, with the word of other collapses on the streets, each mech experiencing the same set of symptoms. Neutrals, the Autobots and Decepticons who haven’t left with the exiled groups_—_the attacks struck some and spared others indiscriminately.

The cause hadn’t been revealed.

And now no matter how much Blast Off coaxed, Onslaught refused to go and recharge.

Standing in the doorway but not quite over the threshold, the shuttle frowned behind his mask at the back of Onslaught’s helm. He opened his mouth to voice another protest, then reconsidered, closed it, and stepped back. It was too late for Blast Off to be in the mood for disagreements and it... wasn’t like Onslaught didn’t have cause to be on edge. What was the harm in Onslaught standing sentry? He’d have to rest sooner or later.

Blast Off went into the berthroom he shared with Vortex and Brawl, and sat down on the edge of his recharge slab.

A new readout blinked in his HUD. He discarded it.

Brawl was already asleep on his own berth, rumbling out small engine noises in his tank mode. He hadn’t shut off the lights. Blast Off got up and turned them off. He went back to his berth. Vortex was absent. Odds were good that he’d slunk away to join Swindle at some bar. (There were only two berthrooms in the apartment and Swindle and Onslaught shared the other. Blast Off dearly missed the luxury of having his own private quarters, a memory-file from a long time ago. Even before the end of the war, it had been bunkrooms and cramped spaceships they’d been assigned more often than not.)

The hours pass.

Brawl snored. Blast Off tried to recharge and found he couldn’t.

His systems alerts kept rousing him before he dropped off into deep defragment, reporting the sounds of the tower creaking around them as false alarms that his weaponry systems attempted to come back online to destroy.

A harsh gust of wind was a flightframe coming in for an aerial bombardment that the walls were too flimsy to withstand, a clang from the machinery inside the walls was a surveillance device scanning for a chance to attack, they suggested. Letting his guard down _could_ prove fatal, probability muttered. It would have, during the war. Blast Off wrote a simple patch and installed it to make the subroutines quiet down.

The war was over but after the last few days, it felt too fresh now.

Too close. 

Too deep-rooted.

(Burrowed too deep to be extricated. The thought made Blast Off uneasy, but why it did he couldn’t pinpoint.)

The _thwap_ of rotary blades turning outside and the eventual shuffling of mechs coming up the stairs betrayed Vortex’s return. After coming inside, Swindle gave himself away as well_—_with his short built, his footsteps were lighter than that of his teammates. There’s the soft murmur of mechs moving around and conversation rising and falling as Onslaught said something to them from where he sat like he was carved from a block of granite at the table, and they reply.

A long block of light spilled across the berthroom’s floor and crept up the wall as Vortex came in and made a beeline for his berth. Engex was in his systems, Blast Off wagered. Before the light was sliced off by the door closing, Blast Off saw Swindle’s heels whisking around the corner of the hallway and towards his own room.

He waited, but no sounds of Onslaught’s footsteps treading along the same path came.

**////**

Onslaught stayed up at the table for the rest of the night, a gun in his hands and optics fixed unerringly on the front door.

Morning came and found him wide awake.

**Author's Note:**

> While working out how I personally wanted to interpret their IDW backstories for another unfinished fic, I went with Brawl and Blast Off being forged and Vortex and Onslaught being cold constructed. I can go either way on Swindle’s origins as forged or cold constructed.
> 
> And deciding some of the Combaticons were cold constructed made me think about this scenario.


End file.
